Business As Unusual: Coping With COVID-19
By Sima Kumar
Where does one begin to write about what it’s like being a bootstrapped startup in an era of the unknown? As a yoga practitioner, my only offering is to start in the now. We are in a wild and altogether unprecedented reality.
We’ve abandoned our scheduled content calendar this week to embrace the responsibility and challenges of creating a community-based company and sharing our reality instead of hiding behind a confusing cocktail of facts and fear.
Since joining The Other Box, first as a consultant, then as a team member and now as the CEO, I have seen first-hand that the consistent question that has always driven the co-founders Leyya Sattar and Roshni Goyate is: how will this add value and support the TOB community? As of today, they have organically grown The Other Box community to over 3000 members. So it’s no surprise the Coronavirus pandemic has a lot of us worried. ‘A lot of us’ means 3000 people who are marginalised and not guaranteed a voice in the mainstream narrative when it’s business-as-usual, are now at higher risk of keeping their job. It’s no secret we are not part of the austerity inner-circle. In a time of unprecedented crisis, the reality the marginalised live with every day, one of being in survival mode, becomes heightened, and it’s easy to feel insecure, anxious and unhinged. The future is unknown, and we must remember that now is the time to come together as a community more than ever. To offer support, care, advice and most importantly, our humanity.
Through our emails and social channels, one of the most prominent themes to percolate to the surface has been individuals and groups seeking ways to weather the storm as small business owners and freelancers. What we want to offer as a collective is what we are doing this week, with a disclaimer that it could change next week.
The Other Box makes its money by teaching our signature Know Your Bias™ courses, Consultancy, Events and Brand Partnerships. As a core team of three, we are currently functioning by working remotely and practising a combination of social distancing and self-isolation. We have always been a remote team, so this current way of working isn’t a state switch for us. Google Hangouts is where we spend most of our time when not working together in person at co-working spaces we belong to in Central London.
As COVID-19 reaches critical mass in London and our go-to co-working spaces close down, we are open for business as unusual. To the TOB community and anyone who stumbles across this post by accident, I want to provide insight into how we are continuing to work together and with clients when everything feels jeopardised.
ACCEPTANCE
Did you know when Leyya and Roshni created The Other Box they weren’t friends? They knew of each other but didn’t know each other. Add me into the mix, (I met them via Twitter) and you have three women from three different decades, the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s navigating building a business while learning each other. Our backgrounds and cultural touchpoints are as varied as they are similar. My advice is to learn to accept each person as they are, without trying to change them into who we want them to be. For anyone with a controlling nature, this is much harder than it sounds. Without acceptance, humanity is almost impossible to imbed into the company culture. Like a yoga class, it takes commitment to show up, practice and constantly adjust throughout the journey. We focus on alignment, not agreement. Which means we agree to disagree, but we accept to move forward with the higher value of how we work. The take-away here is it’s good to know what your values are as a company. A company doesn’t exist without people. So the baseline take-away is to know your own personal values. Without acceptance, humanity is almost impossible to imbed into the company culture. Like a yoga class, it takes commitment to show up, practice and constantly adjust throughout the journey. We focus on alignment, not agreement. Which means we agree to disagree, but we accept to move forward with the higher value of how we work. The take-away here is it’s good to know what your values are as a company. A company doesn’t exist without people. So the baseline take-away is to know your own personal values.
INTENTIONAL COMMUNICATION
This is a big one for me. And something I am personally driven to imbed in Leyya and Roshni as female founders. Women often speak in a passive tone, both verbally and through written communication. Becoming intentional in your communication is vital with colleagues and external partners and clients. Practising intentional communication between colleagues is where the seeds are planted. By the time you have to send a difficult email or have an awkward conversation, you won’t break out in a cold sweat. Much like working out, it’s a muscle you have to build. One way to check if your communication is intentional is to audit for phrases with “just”: “I’m just emailing to see if you’ve received my last email”. Drop the “just” and get to the point. Another is to NOT lead with “sorry”.
SUPPORT
Leyya, Roshni and I have three very different life situations at home. This is something we see as a bonus when having to work with multiple clients and juggle various projects. Roshni and I are early risers, her because she is a mum with a toddler, me because I practice yoga at sunrise. Leyya swings into action and is at her best from 11am which means she tends to work later into the evening. There is a now-famous analogy I use about train stations. The TOB train station has multiple trains leaving different platforms at the same time. Each train has a driver, the lead, and the other two come through as support. Each train must have a clear destination and arrival time, and if it’s running late, the driver is responsible for alerting the support team 48 hours before. Because let’s face it, you know you’re going to miss a deadline at least two days before you miss it, yet we often wait until the last minute and let our teams down. As a yoga teacher, the best support I can offer a student is to provide an adjustment BEFORE they injure themselves. The same ethos is practised here. Often, the barrier to proactive communication when something you’re responsible for isn’t going to happen as and when planned, is the attachment to image and ego. We all have it. At The Other Box, there is a constant tearing down of attachment to image and ego. Sometimes it means we feel like shitheads and that feeling is a great motivator to not choose the same behaviour again. As we each commit to owning our failures and recognise how it is linked to a We, not Me result, transformation becomes possible.
One of the ways we’re practicing being in We mode at the moment is by pulling together so Roshni can stop working by 3pm each day, as her family childcare budget has been impacted by the postponement of freelance work for her husband. Another way of being in We mode that we have always adhered to for scheduling is to leverage technology that tracks our menstrual cycles. We share when we are expecting our periods so we can schedule work sessions and client meetings accordingly. Having this level of transparency means no one needs to put up a facade and “power through” being a human being while trying to build a business. It also embraces that female-led businesses don’t have to function with an alpha male mentality that was prevalent for women in business throughout the ’80s and ’90s.
Whether you’re a solopreneur, a small team, a freelancer or part of a larger group, check in with your internal system. The one where you explore who you are as a person and why you are the way you are. It’s a key ingredient in building a strong foundation. The lack of importance of self-awareness as we enter the world of work is why so many people suffer from imposter syndrome. If you don’t know who you are, it’s hard to promote yourself, your gifts and skills to the world with confidence. And believe me, the era of “fake it til you make it” is over.
Now that I’ve shared some insight into how the humanity of The Other Box is being architected, I’ll share how we are negotiating the work we do with our clients.
COMPASSION
Because of the nature of our courses and consultancy, we don’t view our clients as clients, but rather as partners. We are their external internal. Our work with each client is bound by a non-disclosure agreement because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the forensic details that are shared with us about the (lack) of diversity, inclusion and equity in companies can be detrimental if not handled with the utmost confidence. During this time, it’s understandable to want to secure clients, but as we move into social distancing and isolation, we have had to postpone some training. It’s essential to practice compassionate communication from a place of an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset. When things escalated from Friday the 13th to Monday the 16th, we spearheaded our emails to our clients to firstly check in on their teams and see how they are doing, ask if they moved to remote work and then work together to figure out new timelines for our projects and training. To date, and we are very grateful, none of our clients has cancelled or had to tell us they cannot honour their contracts. At present we are doing consultancy work that can be executed remotely and delivering work digitally and via video meetings. Together we are creating a new project and delivery schedule for those who signed off a budget to work with us before the Coronavirus pandemic escalated in the UK. It’s so important to build a business with process and procedure, so you aren’t flying by the seat of your pants.
An essential factor in building a company that is a service provider is to have a Letter Of Engagement (LOE). Contracts have many clauses and specific parts to it, which means they can take longer to negotiate and the details agreed on. Diversity, inclusion and equity work is not a one-size-fits-all offering. An LOE that is signed by authorised representatives becomes a legally binding agreement. This has been an essential aspect of safe-guarding our business on a fiscal level. I highly recommend inserting an LOE into your business process if you haven’t already. And remember to include people as part of your process. This is a new frontier that is frightening for everyone, even those who work for global agencies and companies. They may have greater job security and income protection options, but they also have their own hopes and fears, potential underlying health conditions and families and loved ones who are at risk even if they are not. Kindness goes a long way. The way I do this is to see people as human beings, not human doings.
TRANSPARENCY AND TRUST
I am proud to say our clients, especially the ones we have long-standing projects and activations with, engage with us with a great deal of transparency and trust. There really isn’t any other way to do the kind of work The Other Box does. And whereas it’s true, some companies use D&I training as a tick-box exercise, our work is about long-term partnerships with a commitment to culture change. It’s exciting to see businesses are starting to understand that diversity and inclusion are not nice-to-have, but the must-have to future-proof their businesses from a cultural and commerce point of view. To address the elephant in the room: the work we do tackles systemic racism in companies. Having three brown women come in and get to the nitty-gritty of what is working, what isn’t working, and what is barely working isn’t something that predominantly white CEOs are comfortable exposing. But this happens. And it happens regularly. For this level of trust, our internal foundations must be robustly worked on and tested each and every day. By the time we are in conversation with clients, there is nothing to sell. People work with people they trust and like. We teach bias, so we know this very well. Being intentional in our communication and compassionate with our approach, we have built a company that both the community and clients feel good about. This feeling is one of trust and safety to guide and explore uncharted territory. Which is what we are doing now.
The take-away here is we are very clear on our company’s brand archetype. The components of our personal brand archetypes play into a collective brand archetype. My experience and commitment to building businesses on a model of yoga philosophy with the value of pursuing knowledge and seeking that which is true above all else means my own brand archetype is The Sage. Roshni being a writer and nature lover while becoming a mum means her personal brand archetype is The Caregiver. She cares about words, she cares about Mother Nature, she cares about being a mother and other mothers. Leyya is the Everyperson brand archetype. Her driving force is a sense of belonging, for herself and others. This is what makes her the most infectious personality out of all of us. The community gravitates towards her, and she picks up the slack wherever it may be, regardless of late-night or on the weekends. She is the most active on social media and has a knack of appealing to a broad spectrum of people. This is directly linked to her ability to be authentic. She owns what she is good at and chases us for help with aspects of work she struggles with.
Together, all of this means The Other Box is an Explorer brand archetype. Our value is freedom. When it comes to roadblocks within companies who are our clients, we operate as guides and explorers. We 100% do not subscribe to call-out-culture, which is so prevalent today. And although we have never articulated this before, and it is much of the work I did with Leyya and Roshni before officially joining them, I am sharing it here because these are the structures of a business one cannot see that sustain us during unimaginable realities. And because I want anyone who reads this that has never taken these factors into consideration, to use this time to get clear on who you are, what you do and if you want to continue doing what you do the way you’ve been doing it after we come out the other side of the Coronavirus crisis.
INNOVATION
Now is also a time to innovate. We have been doing this internally for a year so that we may scale our offerings then build into new verticals that have greater impact. As we have more time on our hands these days, we will be using the time away from clients to move closer towards innovating on our services and offerings, so they are accessible to companies in times of crisis and are available globally. We are also having conversations about what makes us happy, what makes us unhappy, what are our fears and what are our hopes. I personally function on a Fight Club philosophy. I hurl myself into the worst-case scenario and work backwards. It’s in the working back that I find solutions that are otherwise unavailable to me. The way I do this without freaking myself out is by grounding myself with a daily meditation practice. Something that links me to my breath and the present moment. And then… everything is an exploration.
In sharing a peek into how we are building a holistic company in practice and not theory, the take-away is there are no fast fixes, no get rich quick or chai dying gimmicks and definitely no guarantees of not losing it all along the way. What is present is three South Asian women with roots in three different parts of the world, from working-class backgrounds coming together as strangers, building friendships and exploring freedom with a community of creatives and world-renown clients and having a lot of fun along the way.
